Personally, I always do seasons on hardcore. To your second question, no there isn't really anything special for doing seasonal hardcore in lieu of softcore. However if you haven't tried it though, and don't often deal with lag or random disconnects, I would highly encourage trying hardcore (seasonal or otherwise). In my personal experience the adrenaline you get when you hit low health after your passive has already proc'ed is truly exhilarating. I also think it promotes smarter and better play, you know because of the whole death thing if you make a bad move.

Be forewarned though, hardcore has completely ruined softcore for me... it just seems so boring in comparison. Whats the worst thing that happens if you end up dying in softcore? You lose whatever bonus you had left on your pool of reflection? I also think it makes the leaderboards mean a lot more, you look at the top players and see what they were running and how you're gonna catch up to them, but then you look in their profile and that character is already dead. On softcore, you can repeatedly attempt rifts you probably shouldn't be doing in hopes that you get the lucky rift that had the mobs and rift guardian that you can easily kill. I don't know, just my two cents.

Honest question, did the original OP die at all during the process? If Not,Would this count as an ironman challenge completion if they didn't? I know they can't use better than white quality gear and that they cannot die, are there any other rules?

Unfrotunately this isn't a bug, He stands still while casting, but you used meta (which has a stun component on the land) which ended up interrupting his channel. The channel is only there to keep him still, it doesn't actually do anything. But interrupting it like that will make him move to you. In the future you should meta into the open space behind you =(

Buying with real money I agree with, but if you also apply this to buying with gold too I would have to disagree. There is an art to making gold, and if you want to be a mount collector but your method of playing the game is playing the AH. You may not be a top end mythic raider or PvPer, but if you can convince those people to carry you through those things by paying them with gold. That's just another way to play the game. I do not believe that cheapens the collection at all.

I just buy ghost iron ore en masse. Then transmute 90% of it to trillium for living steel cooldowns, keep a few hundred bars for jard cooldowns. Then you can farm the mobs before the first boss in heart of fear for harmonies. Get about 10-18 motes per run. Reset 10 times per hour.

When you kill the adds in phase 2 leave their souls there they should be up long enough to kite the boss back to them and I found that was just about when I needed a chunk of healing to survive. You should be full from killing the adds due to demonic and the meta leech talent. But besides demonic use the regular raid talents (bloodlet if you have bracers) for that phase and your dps output should be fine

Not sure what your ilvl is, but I beat phase 1 with demonic using prydaz and raddons with 899 ilvl (and the kill I probably would have been fine without prydaz but was using it as a crutch for so long) and was just fine switching to my raiding talent loadout (I did keep demonic instead of chaos blades though for add damage) with bracers and belt at 902 ilvl and had like a fourth of the platform left when I killed it. I definitely couldn't do that phase with demons bite, mainly due to lack of practice with actually having to use it. I also recommend taking your interrupt off your bars for the second boss as the other two times I got to that phase I accidentally interrupted his channel and then he walks on top of you when you spawn the adds and he heals for a lot.

I mean you can definitely make that argument. But they would counter that it's neither down nor unavailable. Look at it this way, say I have a server that can shake hands with 200 connections every second but I am receiving 2000 connection requests every second. 1800 of those requests time out and the server may LOOK down to them, but the other lucky 200 people shook hands and connected just fine. I can't say it's down Cuz those people got in just fine. It's one of those things where the callous IT guy gets to say it's "working as intended" it's just at capacity. Now I don't know what hardware elysium is running nor what numbers it can handle or is being asked to handle. Maybe they are considering upgrading hardware which could address the problem but I read a thread the other day saying their server costs are already 1200+ a month and if they're not making money doing this I'm not sure how much more out of pocket expense you can reasonably ask them to take on.

I have not looked around so they may have stated that it was down somewhere. But in the three other threads I read the "find on your own" method of determining the status of the logon-server was to ping it, Which has just as unlikely chance of getting through as a real request. Most requests WILL timeout.

Unless they have stated otherwise I doubt the Logon-Server (Authentication Server) has ever been unavailable or offline at any point in the last week or so. It has to handle all the requests for all three servers that they are currently hosting. With how many people that are attempting to login at the same time since Elysium PVP launched on Saturday and because this realm has attracted players from all over the world we are effectively simulating a 24/7 DDOS on their authentication server. It simply can't handle all the requests that it is getting and a majority of tries will time out. You just have to try again, and they recommend (nearly plead) that you only try once every thirty seconds.

As I understand it, Shuffling is when you take raw materials and shuffle them through your various crafting professions to turn it into one or many things. IE: Taking stonehide leather and turning them into warhide pants, then obliterating the blues and disenchanting the epics would be shuffling your stonehide to obliterum and Shards and Crystals.

The only term I have ever heard for buying ugly stacks and making nice clean stacks as you called them is "Pretty Stacking"

As Dottie states abvove, the laws in the US differ from the EU. Promoting gambling in a 12+ game in the EU is forbidden by law. US legislation however is more relaxed in this area.

So it appears that this seems to be regional. My guild uses GCG every single raid night and multiple tens of thousands of gold exchange hands every raid. We have been doing this for years without any repercussions. However, if someone in your "friend" group reported you for scamming or something, the ambiguity in the ToS will probably favor them as it doesn't seem to be clear cut. Someone may have been salty that you won and reported you. Gotta be very careful who you gamble with.

I mean, I can kind of see the rationale depending on what the price was before you reset it. If they were going for like 2.5k a piece, and he follows the market closely, and can see that it hasn't been over 5k for over a month (on my server). He can post for 4k, which looks amazing in contrast to your 5k posts to push sales and he is making 1.5k more than he expected already.

Yes, I highly recommend World Quests List. My friend recommended it to me the third day of the expansion and it is amazing. I have never changed it from the default sorting (Gear by ilvl, AP, Resources, other Misc stuff) and it highlights factions with which you have an emmisary quest. By artifact power quests it will put two asterisks (**) if your next artifact knowledge level will be done before that world quest expires. Also, and this may be a feature in the default UI, if you click on the name of a quest from the list and go to the flight master it will put a big red 'X' on the flight master map where the quest is, allowing you to see the closest flight point really easily.